Wednesday, 28 May 2008

Forget The Weakest Link, Anne Robinson's special WAG edition of her TV show should have been called Beauty And The Beastly.

Miss Robinson shone a harsh spotlight into the minds of the new princesses of popular culture and found a pea.

To be honest, you'd have needed an air-and-sea searchlight to find anything between the diamond-studded ears of these young women.

So, here we have it. Lined up were Alex Best, ex-wife of a deceased football drunk; Charley Uchea, a Big Brother contestant, whose cousin is a footballer; Danielle Lloyd, Teddy Sheringham's ex; Linsey Dawn McKenzie, who married footballer Mark Williams; Amii Grove, who dates footballer Jermaine Pennant; and Michelle Marsh, Lucy Pinder, Cassie Sumner and Lauren Pope - who are still looking for their princely footballer and kissing a lot of frogs on the way.

Some of these girls weren't even trophy girlfriends, they were consolation prizes.

Anne Robinson could match any WAG million for million. The only difference is, love her or loathe her, she's earned it herself. In terms of intelligence, the lot of them put together would not have added to the first digit in their host's IQ.

Miss Robinson was magnificent, almost motherly in her concern.

The Weakest Link presenter Anne Robinson seemed to have more intelligence than all the WAGs put together during Saturday's TV show

Well, more Mommie Dearest to be honest. Winston Churchill would have been proud of her put-downs, Margaret Thatcher of her withering glances.

But she was provoked. When you have in front of you a young woman who thinks the politician who delivers the Budget each year is not the Chancellor but Tony Blair, when a birdbrain 'absolutely knows' the name of the Greek goddess of love is Viagra, Robinson can be forgiven a blow-torch look or two.

You could just see her thinking, so this is what the sisters fought for, a generation of young women who think Sense And Sensibility was written by Jane Hawkins.

For a moment, I thought I was watching a David Attenborough special on the Darwinian theory of the evolution of man, or woman in this case.

But it wasn't the ascent of woman, from ape to primate, but the descent from able to Primark. These young women are regressing at a frightening rate.

They pride themselves on their stupidity. Which is all the more galling as none of them, well hardly any of them, is really stupid.

But we are right to have tears of laughter and despair in our eyes when a young woman demonstrates she doesn't know the difference between a boutique and a boudoir.

Well, I guess you can just about understand that, because for them to get in to the boutique with their footballer's credit card, they have to go through the boudoir first.

Thinking I was tuning in to the Six O'Clock News, I was taken aback on Monday night to see Anne Robinson and nine very polished young women.

And I don't mean nicely dressed, good manners, conversant in several languages. Not that kind of polished.

The nine women were as pink and transparent as a set of highly buffed acrylic false nails.

Sweet girls, but with 'desperate to hook rich footballer' stamped all over their decolletage and, no doubt, their St Tropez tans.

Such is the desire to be a celebrity that even girls so intellectually challenged they think 'hello' is spelled with an exclamation mark are prepared to put themselves forward on a national TV quiz show to be humiliated.

But in the world of Big Brother fame, even to be known as the dimmest twit on the show is a badge of honour.

Who can forget the heroines of this generation? Celebrity Big Brother's Chantelle was the daft gazelle of a monosyllabic girl who knew only three words, 'Oh my God', wasn't a celebrity and went on to make millions out of a sham marriage to that even dimmer pop singer Preston, and then sold the divorce story for more mega-bucks.

Or Jade Goody, the woman who thought Rio de Janeiro was a person and said: 'I'm the 25th most influential person in the world and I don't even know what the word means.'

She's been branded a fat pig, a slob, a bigot, a racist, and each label has made her more millions. Her capacity for crassness knows no bounds.

When we live in a world where the educational sub-class worships at the altar of OK! magazine and Coleen McLoughlin is its high priestess, it can come as little surprise that these girls will do anything to become someone.

And their fast-track to achieving this is by TV humiliation.

We'll all remember Amii not for the silly spelling of her name but that when she was asked if her relationship with her footballer boyfriend was ' tempestuous', she said wide-eyed: 'Wot does that mean? Does it mean up and down?'

Still thinking about sex, eh Amii? She'll be taking over from Carole Vorderman on Countdown next.

The disparity between the footballers' wives and girlfriends and Anne was staggering.

The WAGS versus the old bag, beauty versus brains. The only similarity between Anne and at least some of the group was plastic surgery.

Yet Anne was at her sarcastic, sardonic best. I would say for 50 minutes she was the mistress of irony. 'But who cares?' say the WAGS. 'We'll get our cleaning lady to do the irony.'

At the beginning of the show, Anne told the nine women that one of them could leave with £50,000 for their favourite charity.

OK, so she had to explain to a couple of them first that Versace wasn't a war-torn country neighbouring Zimbabwe, and that Dolce & Gabbana wasn't a children's orphanage, but their intentions were good. '

Eight of you will leave with nothing,' she warned.

This turned out to be false. Nine of them left with nothing. But in these days of austerity - when it costs a family £70 to fill their car with petrol for a week - perhaps the sight of these primping, preening wannabes, who spend more on one handbag than many families do on groceries in a month, will not inspire, but irk.

Maybe in the end, the new vulgarians, the footballers and their vacuous wives and girlfriends past and present will prove to be the weakest link in society. And not before time.